Luke 6:20-31
This week our book discussion group gathered together to talk about the most recent book we have read: Ordinary Grace. A man named Frank looks back on one particular summer in his childhood. 1961 in a small town in Minnesota. He was 13 years old, his brother Jake was 9. And in that summer, they confronted death for the first time.
It wasn’t as though they knew nothing of death, actually. Their father was a minister, and they had been to plenty of viewings and funerals in their childhood already. But this summer was different. There were four deaths for these young boys: lives taken by tragic accident, by violence, by unknown causes. Four deaths they met at close proximity. All four, lives taken too soon.
And throughout the story there is the question of faith – and grace. How does faith carry us through times of loss? How does God’s grace bless us in such times?
The experience of loss is one of the inevitable elements of human life. No matter who you are. No matter how much your life might be characterized by blessing, no matter how much it might be characterized by woe.
No matter who you are, you will know loss.
The experience of pain is something that comes to all of us – physical, spiritual, emotional. We will all, at some time, have the need for relief, for healing, for comfort.
Here is a dimension where life is leveled out. You know it when you go to a hospital. The rich, the poor, the young and the old. No one is exempt. There isn’t necessarily a hierarchy for suffering. We all share it in common.
And this was the make up of the crowd that gathered around Jesus that day Luke writes about in chapter 6. There was a great multitude of people who came to Jesus – to hear him, to be healed by him, to be rid of the unclean spirits that troubled them. So he came down to a level place to be amidst them – all of them. the blessed and the woeful.
The weeping and the laughing, the hated and the admired, the rich and the poor, the full and the hungry. Everyone who had need were there. They were all represented in the crowd that day.
They have to be there. Because Jesus is speaking to all of them.
I think perhaps when we read the list of blessings and woes in these verses we try to locate ourselves in them, and the people we know. Who am I? Am I one of the poor who can look forward to seeing the kingdom of God, or am I one of the rich who has already received my consolation? Am I one of the hungry who will, someday, be filled, or am I one of the full who will be hungry? The crying or the laughing? The reviled or the respected?
And I have to say, in these forced-choice questions I don’t know if any of them are all that appealing. You know?
Would you like your reward now or later? Yes, please. Thank you.
But perhaps the reality of this scene is that you can’t sort the people into these groups – the blessed on the right, the woeful on the left. Because they are all together there in their need, their urgent need for Jesus.
Picture this scene. A great multitude gathered on a level place, a plain. All of them after the same thing, all of them pressing against one another. There is no way of sorting them into categories, they are all one – one mass of humanity. And Jesus steps down into the middle of it. To be among the blessed and the woeful.
All of them, no matter how blessed or how woeful they feel, need something. Comfort, healing, wholeness, peace.
Perhaps Jesus wasn’t really contrasting two categories of people. Perhaps he was speaking to the truths that co-exist in every human life. Poverty and riches, tears and laughter, fullness and hunger, fellowship and loneliness.
In Ordinary Grace Frank looks back on that summer of 1961 from the vantage point of his years. In the beginning he tells the reader that, even though you might think that he would look back on that summer as tragedy, this was not the case. Yes, it was tragic in some ways. But there were also blessings, there were lessons, there were miracles.
The story he tells includes the stories of the deaths, but also the stories of love and unfolding glories; the stories of small triumphs, like when Frank gets the better of the town bully – but then also the fear of how the bully might get his vengeance. The story leaves sparks of light throughout, giving Frank and Jake glimpses of goodness where they had previously only seen ugliness; of weakness where they had only seen strength; of vulnerability where they had only seen toughness. All falling on Frank and Jake like little drops of grace.
It is a story of growing up to learn that the world doesn’t allow the sorting of lives into categories of the blessed and the woeful, for each life is touched by both blessing and woe. And the miracle is that in the sorrows we sometimes even receive some blessing.
Trying not to reveal too much of the story, in case you want to read it yourselves – and I strongly encourage you to read it. Let me tell you this one more thing. At the end of the story we catch up with Frank as a mature man, as he describes the Memorial Day ritual he, Jake, and their father carry out each year. They all gather at the cemetery in that small town where they lived in the summer of 1961. They carry with them lavish amounts of flowers, for all the graves they will decorate – a multitude of lives they will remember. The dearly beloved, those whom they were close to; the man whose name they didn’t even know – an itinerant whose body was found near the river where the boys liked to play; the ones whom they might have felt some responsibility for; and the town bully – the one who tormented them throughout their childhood, about whom they discovered only at his death just how alone he was in his life.
We are all, every one of us, among the blessed and the woeful. As the writer of Ecclesiastes says, there is a time for every purpose under heaven – a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. We will all walk through all these things, and we are all in this together.
There is no better place to discover this than in church, where we gather together to celebrate our joys and hold one another up in our grief. We share tears and we help each other see the glimpses of blessing to be found everywhere. We sing and laugh together – and sometimes even dance – all of this in some melding together of delight and wistfulness.
We are all together in this, and Jesus is right here with us too. On that day when a great multitude clamored to reach him, he stepped down onto the plain to be right in there with them.
He is always right here with us too.
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